Appalachian Community Histories – Dabney, Pulaski County: Doolin’s Crossroads, Ped May, and the Historic Post Office
Along Kentucky Route 39, northeast of Somerset, lies Dabney, a small rural community whose history stretches back to the years before the Civil War. Although it never developed into a large town, Dabney served as a center of trade, communication, and everyday life for generations of Pulaski County families. Its history survives in nineteenth-century business directories, federal postal records, and the documentation of a country store and post office that became one of the community’s most recognizable landmarks.
Long before Ped May constructed the building that would eventually earn a place on the National Register of Historic Places, Dabney was already an established postal community. Its post office dates to 1853, and by the early 1880s, the settlement was known locally as Doolin’s Crossroads, a name associated with the family that operated its post office and participated in the surrounding agricultural economy.
Dabney’s story is particularly revealing because its surviving records document more than an old building. They preserve the names of postmasters, teachers, millers, blacksmiths, and other residents whose work sustained a small agricultural settlement through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Early Settlement and the Establishment of Dabney
The development of Dabney followed the broader settlement patterns of Pulaski County, where small farms, country roads, churches, and local trading places gradually formed the foundations of rural communities. During the first half of the nineteenth century, much of the county’s population lived outside Somerset, depending on nearby settlements for services that individual farming households could not provide for themselves.
According to the National Park Service’s 1984 Pulaski County historic-property survey, the county experienced considerable population growth before the Civil War as settlers established small farms along its waterways and roads. Corn, wheat, rye, tobacco, cattle, and hogs were among the principal agricultural products, while gristmills, sawmills, and local merchants provided additional economic opportunities. As these settlements grew, crossroads communities developed around stores, churches, mills, and other establishments serving neighboring farms.
Dabney emerged from this rural landscape, although the precise date when residents first began using the community’s present name remains uncertain. The earliest firmly documented milestone in the available historical research is the establishment of its post office in 1853.
The original National Register nomination for the Dabney Post Office, prepared in 1984, identifies both 1853 and 1875 as important dates in the community’s postal history. The nomination states that the office was first established in 1853 and renewed in 1875, indicating an interruption in its early service. The documentation does not establish the reason for that interruption, making it difficult to determine whether it resulted from the Civil War, changing postal routes, or other circumstances.
Nevertheless, the creation of a post office was an important development for a community like Dabney. Rural post offices connected farm families to relatives, businesses, newspapers, and government institutions beyond their immediate neighborhoods. They also provided an officially recognized geographical identity for settlements that frequently lacked municipal governments or clearly defined boundaries.
Doolin’s Crossroads and the Community in 1881
One of the most informative surviving contemporary accounts of nineteenth-century Dabney appears in R. L. Polk and Company’s Kentucky State Gazetteer and Business Directory for 1881 and 1882. Rather than merely identifying the settlement on a map, the directory describes its location, postal arrangements, transportation connections, and several of the people who worked there.
The entry identifies Dabney by an alternative name, Doolin’s Crossroads, and places it approximately eight miles north of Somerset. It also names Pulaski Station, six miles away, as the community’s nearest railroad shipping point on the Cincinnati Southern Railway. Mail was delivered twice a week, and James Doolin was serving as postmaster.
The name Doolin’s Crossroads provides an important clue about the community’s early identity. In rural Kentucky, settlements frequently carried the names of prominent residents, local merchants, or families associated with road intersections. Although the directory establishes that Dabney was known by the Doolin name, additional property and family records would be necessary to determine precisely when the designation originated.
James Doolin’s responsibilities extended beyond handling the mail, as the directory also identifies him with fine livestock. Other members of the Doolin family were involved in the community’s daily affairs, including a blacksmith identified as C. Doolin and William Doolin, who served as a constable.
Their presence illustrates the importance of extended families in the development of small rural settlements, where relatives often held several of the positions necessary to maintain community institutions and agricultural commerce.
The Families and Trades of Nineteenth-Century Dabney
The 1881 and 1882 business directory provides an unusually detailed glimpse of the occupations represented in Dabney during the late nineteenth century. Its entries identify a community that depended on skilled trades, agricultural services, religious leadership, and education rather than on a single large industry.
Among the residents identified were H. Alexander and C. Doolin, both blacksmiths. Their occupation was particularly important in a farming community where horses, wagons, plows, and other agricultural equipment required regular maintenance.
Andrew Hargis worked as a shoemaker, while Napoleon Hargis was identified as a cooper, a craftsman who produced and repaired wooden barrels and similar containers. William Smith practiced cabinetmaking, and E. W. Sowder and James Wiser operated flour mills. These occupations suggest that Dabney and its surrounding countryside supported a network of small businesses serving farmers and other rural households.
Education and religion also appear in the contemporary directory. James McBee and G. A. C. May were listed as teachers, while the Reverend John Alexander was identified as a Baptist minister. William Owens served as a justice of the peace, providing another connection between Dabney’s residents and the administration of local government.
These names offer a much fuller picture of the settlement than its postal history alone. By the early 1880s, Dabney was home to craftsmen, educators, religious leaders, and public officials whose occupations reflected the economic and social needs of the surrounding agricultural population.
The directory does not identify the locations of individual churches or schools, nor does it establish how long each person remained in the community. Nevertheless, it preserves evidence of the institutions and trades around which rural life developed.
Agriculture, Roads, and the Railroad
Although Dabney was situated within a growing county, its development differed from that of communities located directly along the railroad. When the Cincinnati Southern Railway arrived in Pulaski County during the late 1870s, it encouraged commercial growth in Somerset and the development of railroad settlements such as Eubank and Science Hill.
Dabney remained a crossroads community whose residents depended on roads connecting their farms and businesses to larger commercial centers. The 1881 directory’s identification of Pulaski Station as its nearest shipping point demonstrates how the settlement participated in the regional railroad economy without possessing a station of its own.
The distinction is important because rural communities such as Dabney occupied an intermediate position between individual farms and growing commercial towns. Farmers could obtain local services without traveling all the way to Somerset, while the railroad provided access to markets beyond Pulaski County.
A later historical reference based on Rand McNally’s 1895 Business Atlas and Shippers’ Guide reports that Dabney had a population of 22, possessed a post office, and had no railroad service of its own. Because the original atlas entry has not been independently checked here, the population figure should be treated cautiously and should not be assumed to represent every household in the surrounding countryside.
By the end of the nineteenth century, Dabney had established itself as a small but enduring agricultural settlement. Its location along a country road, combined with its postal service and local businesses, helped it remain connected to the changing economy of Pulaski County.
Ped May and the Dabney Post Office
Around 1900, Ped May constructed the building that would become Dabney’s best-documented historic landmark. Situated at the junction of present-day Kentucky Route 39 and County Road 1317, the one-story wooden structure combined a general store with the community’s post office.
According to its National Register nomination, May operated both establishments, creating a business that became a center of commercial and social activity for the surrounding countryside. The store and post office served a community whose residents remained closely connected to agriculture, and the building became an important gathering place for people living beyond the immediate crossroads.
The arrangement was common in rural Kentucky, where a post office frequently operated inside a privately owned business rather than in a separate government building. For residents living several miles from Somerset, the local store offered a convenient place to collect mail while purchasing supplies and conducting other business.
Dabney’s post office consequently served a purpose that extended beyond delivering letters and newspapers. It brought neighbors into regular contact and provided a familiar meeting place in a community whose farms and households were scattered across the surrounding countryside.
May’s building also illustrates how small rural businesses adapted to their communities. Rather than constructing separate commercial and government facilities, a single establishment could accommodate both functions while creating a recognizable center for the settlement.
Inside the Historic Store and Post Office
The 1984 National Register nomination provides a detailed architectural description of the Dabney Post Office, documenting the building as it appeared more than eight decades after its construction.
The building was a one-story rectangular frame structure covered with weatherboard siding and topped by a metal gable roof. Its main elevation was three bays wide, with two-over-two sash windows and attached four-paneled wooden shutters. A cut-stone foundation supported the structure, while the interior consisted of an open space with counters and shelves arranged along a central aisle.
These details distinguish Dabney’s post office from the larger and more elaborate federal postal buildings constructed in American cities during the same period. Its appearance reflected the practical requirements of a privately operated country store, with a straightforward floor plan that accommodated retail merchandise and postal business.
The National Park Service recorded no associated outbuildings and identified approximately one-tenth of an acre as the historic property. At the time of the survey, the structure was vacant but remained in fair condition.
Its significance lay partly in the survival of its original architectural character. The federal nomination identified the building as one of the few remaining examples in Pulaski County of the traditional wooden structures that had served simultaneously as community stores and post offices.
The Decline of the Post Office and Changes in Rural Pulaski County
During the twentieth century, improvements in transportation, changes in rural commerce, and population movement gradually transformed the countryside surrounding Somerset. As residents became increasingly connected to larger commercial centers, many small settlements experienced changes in the institutions that had once sustained their local economies.
The National Park Service’s countywide historical survey describes declining populations in many rural areas during the decades following 1930, along with improvements in highways and increasing automobile use. These developments changed the relationship between smaller communities and the county’s principal commercial centers.
Dabney’s post office and general store continued to function for much of the twentieth century, but their operations eventually came to an end. The 1984 National Register nomination places the closure during the 1960s, while the historical postal dataset compiled from Richard Helbock’s research and made available through Cameron Blevins identifies 1965 as the closing year.
The loss of postal service marked the end of an institution that had first appeared in Dabney more than a century earlier. Although the community itself remained, the building that had once served as a destination for local residents was no longer operating in its traditional capacity.
Its closure also reflected a broader historical pattern throughout rural Appalachia, where country stores and post offices had long served as informal gathering places. As postal services and commercial activities became concentrated in larger towns, many of these smaller establishments closed, changed their functions, or disappeared entirely.
For Dabney, however, the surviving store and post office eventually attracted the attention of historic preservation officials.
Preserving the Dabney Post Office
By the late twentieth century, historic preservation efforts in Pulaski County had begun documenting surviving buildings associated with the county’s early settlement, agricultural development, commerce, and community institutions.
The Dabney Post Office was recorded as property PU-44 in the county’s historic-property survey. Its National Register documentation identified Mrs. Maggie Pryce as the owner at the time of the nomination, providing another name in the recorded ownership history of the property. The survey did not establish her relationship, if any, to Ped May.
On August 14, 1984, the Dabney Post Office was added to the National Register of Historic Places under reference number 84001954. Its recognized areas of significance were architecture and community planning and development, with its principal historical importance associated with the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The building was included in the broader Pulaski County Multiple Resource Area, a preservation effort that documented historically significant properties throughout the county. Among the other properties included in the survey were country stores, churches, mills, residences, and historic districts associated with the development of Somerset and surrounding settlements.
The survey specifically identified the Dabney Post Office and the Bronston store as examples of buildings that became the centers of rural communities serving nearby farms. Their inclusion recognized the importance of everyday commercial establishments in the development of Pulaski County rather than concentrating exclusively on prominent residences and public buildings.
The 1984 nomination establishes the historic building’s condition at the time of its listing, but that description should not be interpreted as confirmation of its present physical condition or use.
The Historical Legacy of Dabney
Dabney’s surviving history illustrates the important role that small crossroads communities played in the development of Pulaski County. Its earliest documented postal service dates to 1853, while its identification as Doolin’s Crossroads in the 1881 and 1882 business directory preserves the memory of a family closely associated with the settlement’s nineteenth-century identity.
The directory’s references to blacksmiths, teachers, millers, a Baptist minister, a constable, and a justice of the peace reveal a community supported by agriculture and a network of local services. The subsequent construction of Ped May’s general store and post office around 1900 continued this tradition, providing residents with a central establishment that remained important well into the twentieth century.
Although its postal operations ended during the 1960s, the historic building’s inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places ensured that an important part of Dabney’s history received formal recognition. Its weatherboard exterior, traditional construction, and surviving interior arrangement were documented as examples of a once-common building type that had largely disappeared from rural Pulaski County.
Several questions about Dabney remain unanswered, including the origin of its present name, the identities of its earliest postmasters, and the complete histories of its churches and schools. Federal postal records, county property records, historical newspapers, and surviving family collections may eventually provide a more complete account of the settlement and the people who lived there.
What the existing records already demonstrate is that Dabney was more than a place identified on historical maps. It was a community of farmers, merchants, craftsmen, educators, and families whose shared institutions sustained everyday life along a rural Pulaski County crossroads for more than a century.
Sources & Further Reading
R. L. Polk & Co. Kentucky State Gazetteer and Business Directory, 1881–82. Vol. 3, pt. 1. Detroit: R. L. Polk & Co., 1881. Digitized by the Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/kentuckystategaz31rlpo.
United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service. “Dabney Post Office (PU-44).” National Register of Historic Places Inventory Nomination Form, 1984. https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/NRHP/84001954_text.
United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service. Pulaski County Multiple Resource Area, Kentucky. National Register of Historic Places nomination, 1984. https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/GetAsset/NRHP/64000251_text.
United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service. “Dabney Post Office.” National Register of Historic Places, reference no. 84001954, August 14, 1984. https://npgallery.nps.gov/AssetDetail/NRIS/84001954.
Williams, C. S. Williams’ Cincinnati Directory, 1864. Cincinnati, 1864. Includes a directory of United States post offices. Digitized by the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County. https://apps.cincinnatilibrary.org/citydirectory/WilliamsCincinnatiDirectory_1864.pdf.
Works Progress Administration and Robert M. Rennick. “Pulaski County: Post Offices & Place Names.” 1939. County Histories of Kentucky, no. 284. Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/284/.
Rennick, Robert M. “Pulaski County: Post Offices.” 2000. County Histories of Kentucky, no. 388. Morehead State University. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/kentucky_county_histories/388/.
Rennick, Robert M. “Pulaski County: Place Names.” Robert M. Rennick Manuscript Collection, no. 123. Morehead State University, cataloged December 5, 2016. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/rennick_ms_collection/123/.
Rennick, Robert M. “The Post Offices of Pulaski County, Kentucky, Part III.” La Posta: A Journal of American Postal History 38, no. 5 (October–November 2007). https://www.lapostapub.com/Backissues/LP38-5.pdf.
Rennick, Robert M. Kentucky Place Names. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt13x1s3p.
Blevins, Cameron, and Richard W. Helbock. US Post Offices. Historical dataset of American post offices, 1639–2000. Harvard Dataverse. https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/NUKCNA.
National Archives and Records Administration. “Post Office Reports of Site Locations, 1837–1950.” Record Group 28, microfilm publication M1126, roll 231, Kentucky, Powell–Pulaski Counties. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices/locations-1837-1950.html.
National Archives and Records Administration. “Post Office Records.” Includes records of postmaster appointments, 1832–1971, and historical post office locations. Record Group 28. https://www.archives.gov/research/post-offices.
Rand McNally and Company. Rand, McNally & Co.’s Kentucky. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1892. Map. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division. https://www.loc.gov/item/79691679/.
Hoeing, Joseph Bernard, Kentucky Geological Survey, and Kentucky Railroad Commission. Preliminary Map of Kentucky. Lexington: Kentucky Geological Survey, 1891. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division. https://www.loc.gov/item/79691617/.
United States Geological Survey. Historical Topographic Map Collection. Historical maps of Kentucky and the United States. https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/.
Pulaski County Public Library. Digital Archives of the Pulaski County Public Library. Somerset, KY. Historical issues of the Somerset Journal, Commonwealth, and Commonwealth Journal, together with other local records. https://pulaskilibrary.advantage-preservation.com/.
Tibbals, Alma Owens. A History of Pulaski County, Kentucky. Somerset, KY: Moore, 1952. https://books.google.com/books/about/A_History_of_Pulaski_County_Kentucky.html?id=hUh4D_2eUFMC.
Author Note: Dabney’s history reminds us that small crossroads communities were once essential centers of trade, communication, and everyday life for rural Appalachian families. By preserving the stories of its early residents and historic post office, we can better understand the people and institutions that helped shape Pulaski County.